Who’s That Sleeping in My Bed? (Singapore Edition)
80 Years Ago Today: The Imperial Japanese Navy’s Myōkō-class heavy cruiser Ashigara pictured under refit in the King George VI (KG6) graving dock (drydock) at the occupied Royal Navy Base at Seletar, Singapore, on 31 December 1942, at the time run by the No.101 Naval Construction and Repair Department of the IJN.
The largest drydock in the world at the time, KG6 had only opened on 15 February 1938 after a decade of construction, and went 1,000 feet in length, was 130-feet wide and 35-feet deep, capable of accommodating any British battleship ever built.
The 80,000-ton, 1,004-foot (wl) ocean liner RMS Queen Mary in Singapore KG6 Graving Dock, Aug 1940. She, along with several other liners, was converted into a troopship to carry Australian and New Zealand soldiers to the United Kingdom (Australian War Memorial image 128444)
Just days after the fall of Singapore three years later, the dockyard was buzzing again with local Chinese, Malay and Indian workers, alongside impressed British POWs, all busy repairing sabotage carried out by the Royal Navy and before the year was out, the KG6 was accommodating key IJN units, with the Takao-class heavy cruiser Chokai repaired there in late February 1942– only two weeks after Singapore surrendered.
The dock soon became a target of Allied air forces as the war came back to Singapore and by February 1945 KG6 was put out of service via a 100-aircraft B-29 raid, with the IJN fleet oiler Shiretoko inside. However, like a phoenix, the dock was back in service once said tanker was cleared out within a year of VJ Day.
Today part of the Sembawang Shipyard, KG6 remains in use alongside the even larger 400,000 DWT capacity Premier Dock built in the 1970s, as well as three large floating docks.
As for Ashigara, the big Japanese cruiser shown in the top image, she was, somewhat appropriately, sunk by the British submarine HMS Trenchant in the Bangka Strait, 8 June 1945– while en route back to Singapore.